Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic

1991 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Honig
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Declaration Of Independence

Beginning with Hannah Arendt's depiction of the American Revolution and founding, I critically examine Arendt's reading of the Declaration of Independence, comparing it with Jacques Derrida's reading of (a draft of) the same document, in order to show that Arendt is careless in her easy dismissal of the declaration's essentialist moments. Derrida, it seems to me, has a better, more subtle appreciation of the both necessary and impossible role of essentialism in modern political theory and practice. I conclude, however, that Arendt nonetheless succeeds in theorizing a powerful and suggestive practice of political authority for modernity, a practice that is uniquely activist and appropriate for a democratic politics.

Jacques Rancière

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
Action Taking ◽  
As If

This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière, unpredictability is integral to democratic politics. Thus, in an anti-Rousseauian move, he emphasizes the theatrical aspect of democratic action: taking on a role other than who they are, acting as if they are a part in a given social order in which they have no part, political actors stage their equality, disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s focus on the moments of disruption, however, opens him to the charge of reducing democratic politics to immediate acts of negation. Insofar as he erases the role of intermediating practices in the stagings of equality, Rancière imposes on his accounts a kind of purity that his own work, with its emphasis on broken, polemical voices, cautions against.

Save the Appearances! Toward an Arendtian Environmental Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
LAURA EPHRAIM
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Environmental Politics ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Anthropogenic Contamination ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Critical Resources

Drawing critical resources from Hannah Arendt, this article argues for a revaluation of the appearances of nature in environmental political theory and practice. At a time when pervasive anthropogenic contamination threatens the very survival of vulnerable communities and species, it would be wrong to revive the timeworn mythos of nature as an untrammeled beauty. Instead, with Arendt’s help, I advocate an environmental politics rooted in an alternative aesthetic of nature, one that respects and seeks to protect earth’s diverse lifeforms for the sake of their strange, disquieting appearances of otherness. Earth’s living displays of alterity are valuable, I argue, for their propensity to upset the destructive logic of mass production and consumption and spur political action. In an Arendtian frame, we can better recognize interdependence between biological and political life and appreciate the role of nonhuman lifeforms in constituting spaces of appearance where human freedom and plurality may flourish.

Can Political Authority be Founded on a Ruse? Derrida and Lefort on Machiavelli’s Use of Political Deception

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peg Birmingham
Keyword(s):  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The People ◽  
Theological Foundation ◽  
The Law

The institution of Hobbes’ Leviathan is marked by the transformation of cunning, equally shared by all in the state of nature, into a rational, sovereign politics. The question I take up here by way of Machiavelli and two of his contemporary readers, Derrida and Lefort, what if cunning was politicized rather than replaced by sovereign reason? In other words, what if cunning, a complex political deception, was not abandoned or given over to the sovereign? I argue that Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli, embracing as it does the central role of a shared cunning or ruse between the people and the prince, offers valuable resources for thinking the foundation of political authority for a secular democratic politics, while in contrast, Derrida’s critique of Machiavelli’s cunning illuminates why he is not able to escape a sovereign, theological foundation for political authority and the law.

Politics and Society: Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 662-666
Author(s):  
Michael Lacewing ◽  
Richard G.T. Gipps
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Social Oppression ◽  
The Third ◽  
Radical Ideas

This introduction provides an overview of the four chapters in this section, which explores the link between psychoanalysis and social and political theory. Each chapter examines or advocates radical change; the first appeals to psychoanalytic ideas to support radicalism concerning the basis of war and pacifism; the second deals with the organization of education; the third argues for change in psychoanalytic theory and practice by emphasizing socially radical ideas on gender; and the fourth traces the origins of radical thinking in psychoanalysis to ‘Jewish modernity’. Also discussed are Sigmund Freud’s Civilization, which addresses the nature of social oppression and its internalization in the superego; how society imposes normative social categories in the formation of human individuals; the role of anxiety and of defences against anxiety; contemporary populism in relation to the role of a leader and changing social expressions of inegalitarianism; and how best to contain human destructiveness.

scholarly journals The philosopher as engaged citizen: Habermas on the role of the public intellectual in the modern democratic public sphere

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102110031
Author(s):  
Peter J. Verovšek
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Relationship

Realists and supporters of ‘democratic underlabouring’ have recently challenged the traditional separation between political theory and practice. Although both attack Jürgen Habermas for being an idealist whose philosophy is too removed from politics, I argue that this interpretation is inaccurate. While Habermas’s social and political theory is indeed oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of political debate as a public intellectual. Building on his approach, I argue that giving the theorist a direct role in public policy undermines theory as an enterprise oriented towards truth while overlooking the contingency, participatory nature and complicated internal logics of social and political practice. My basic thesis is that Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice overcomes these difficulties by providing an account of theory that is independent but simultaneously also allows philosophers to participate in politics as public intellectuals.

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Nacol
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
History Of Political Economy ◽  
History Of Finance ◽  
Scholarly Attention

In The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock shows how Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentine political thinkers adapted Aristotelian and Polybian insights to create a paradigm of republican political thought that was sensitive to the problem of stabilizing civic virtue against inevitable political decay in time. This republican paradigm, he famously insists, traveled to eighteenth-century Anglo-American contexts via the work of James Harrington and helped political thinkers make sense of two seemingly disparate events—the rise of finance in Britain and the American Revolution—in civic republican terms. Pocock’s insistence that The Machiavellian Moment is a work of history does not negate its contributions to political theory. First, it is a significant text for political theorists who attend to the role of language and discourse in political thinking, although the Pocockian approach bears limitations worth acknowledging. Second, Pocock’s work is critical to the republican revival in contemporary political theory, because he centers and defends Florentine and Anglo-American republicanisms as political discourses worthy of scholarly attention. Lastly, The Machiavellian Moment appears, in hindsight, as a foundational text for scholarship in the history of political economy, particularly the pre-history of finance and credit.

Leave the Dead Some Room to Dance: Postcolonial Founding and the Problem of Inheritance in Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-356
Author(s):  
David Thomas Suell
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Critical Part ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Dead

In this essay, I examine Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests in order to think through political founding. Viewing founding from the postcolonial context, I explore how members of a political community negotiate among the multiple pasts that continue to affect them, and what kind of institutions and actors are best equipped to pursue this critical part of the founding project. Situating Soyinka’s account against competing narratives of the postcolonial condition, I demonstrate how he uses Yoruba philosophy and cosmology to reframe the challenges and potentials of founding, and I illustrate how political actors should respond to these by adopting the role of “citizen-artists” who can learn from past struggles and overcome their overwhelming legacies. Read as a dramatic intervention into Nigerian democratic politics and as a work of political theory, A Dance offers a lens through which to interrogate founding within and beyond the postcolony.

Kropotkin

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Kinna
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Special Character ◽  
Revolutionary Politics

This book is designed to remove Peter Kropotkin from the framework of classical anarchism. By focusing attention on his theory of mutual aid, it argues that the classical framing distorts Kropotkin's political theory by associating it with a narrowly positivistic conception of science, a naively optimistic idea of human nature and a millenarian idea of revolution. Kropotkin's abiding concern with Russian revolutionary politics is the lens for this analysis. The argument is that his engagement with nihilism shaped his conception of science and that his expeditions in Siberia underpinned an approach to social analysis that was rooted in geography. Looking at Kropotkin's relationship with Elisée Reclus and Erico Malatesta and examining his critical appreciation of P-J. Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Max Stirner, the study shows how he understood anarchist traditions and reveals the special character of his anarchist communism. His idea of the state as a colonising process and his contention that exploitation and oppression operate in global contexts is a key feature of this. Kropotkin's views about the role of theory in revolutionary practice show how he developed this critique of the state and capitalism to advance an idea of political change that combined the building of non-state alternatives through direct action and wilful disobedience. Against critics who argue that Kropotkin betrayed these principles in 1914, the book suggests that this controversial decision was consistent with his anarchism and that it reflected his judgment about the prospects of anarchistic revolution in Russia.

The problem of reflection in German philosophy of the XVIII - XIX centuries

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 141-145
Author(s):  
L. A. Checal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Conceptual Representation ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Historical Aspect ◽  
Theoretical Significance ◽  
Self Knowledge

This study focuses on a conceptual representation of the metaphysical and non-classical context of reflection in its subjective dichotomous understanding. The author successively reviews the specifics of reflection, as well as the features of methodology of cognition and self-knowledge in the context of determining the values and priorities of human development and consciousness. The article also includes an overview of the main categories of reflection through a breakdown of theoretical relationships and the most important conceptual discourses. The theoretical significance of the problem of cognition and self-knowledge is determined by the central role of man in society and history. The analysis shows that the methodology of cognition and self-knowledge should be based on the principles of axiological disengagement, a combination of logical and historical aspect, as well as on the coherence of theory and practice.

A Political Age

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Mitchell Sommers
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Political Events ◽  
London Corresponding Society

This chapter places Ebenezer and Manoah Sibly in the dramatic political events of their day, especially the American and French Revolutions, and the Treason Trials of the 1790s. Ebenezer is frequently cited as a radical Whig, who opposed slavery and supported the American Revolution and other radical causes. Little is said about Manoah’s politics, other than that as a New Church minister, he was of necessity a loyalist. However, a close examination of Ebenezer’s writing, and especially the timing of the publication of his comments on the American and French Revolutions, reveals him as much more moderate than has been asserted, especially in discussions of his nativity for the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, Manoah’s work as shorthand taker for the London Corresponding Society and acceptance of Swedenborg’s dramatically radical theology reveal him as a profoundly radical thinker—and one who was moved to act on his convictions.

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